In the education laboratory with Garreth Heidt

In which Dan talks with Garreth Heidt, an educator in Pennsylvania who’s spent a career thinking about and practicing how education could be different. Garreth leads the Nova LAB program at Perkiomen Valley HS.

Dan and Garreth discuss human systems and agency, risk taking in the classroom, challenging the status quo, and empowering students to see beyond grades and find purpose.

I welcome comments and questions on Instagram, Twitter, and Threads @BigIdeaEd

Mentioned in the episode:
Nova LAB at Perkiomen High School
Why John Dewey’s vision for education and democracy still resonates today from The Conversation
Future Search Network
The Path to Purpose: How Young People Find Their Calling in Life by Bill Damon
Pure Genius: Building a Culture of Innovation and Taking 20% Time to the Next Level by Don Wettrick
Wayfinder
A Whack on the Side of the Head: How You Can Be More Creative by Roger von Oech

Music by Smart Toaster 

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

The lesson is you need to make space where risk is possible and where the fear of failure is not a fear, right? Like, and I know it sounds trite now because every teacher has in their classroom a poster that says fail, first attempt in learning, right? Okay, so cliche now. But you can say that all you want. As long as you have grades and as long as you are holding people to these really, really high standards, you're never going to break out of the system that is simply trying to replicate itself.

SPEAKER_00 1:03

Today's show is an interview with Gareth Height, an educator in Pennsylvania who spent a career thinking about and practicing how education could be different. I contacted Gareth after reading about his Nova lab program at Preaman Valley High School. I was intrigued by the program's vision and the posted samples of student work. In our conversation, though, it quickly became apparent that Gareth is a deeply thoughtful philosophical educator. We largely didn't even get into the nuts and bolts of Nova as we spend more time pondering some, well, big ideas. That is the name of the podcast. Gareth and I touch on human systems and agency, risk taking in the classroom, challenging the status quo, and empowering students to see beyond grades and find purpose. I hope you enjoy.

SPEAKER_01 2:13

Perfect. Like it, there's nobody here today. And so we have bells. Okay. Yeah. My name is Gareth Height. Uh, this is my 31st year of teaching, all of it in the same school district, Perkyomen Valley School District in Collegeville, Pennsylvania. And um I teach high school um English classes. I teach and helped start the high school gifted program. And I also teach a class in social entrepreneurship and innovation called Nova Lab, which I started back in 2016 or so.

SPEAKER_00 2:49

And I can't wait to ask you about this program, which is so intriguing and sounds so engaging. Uh, we we had a bit of a time finding uh a time slot to talk. And I was thinking this morning as I was coming in about how there's so many jobs out there where people can just sort of schedule things and teaching. It's not like that in teaching, you know, to work around the kids.

SPEAKER_01 3:11

I often look at getting those planned books, you know, like plan your day out or whatever, because I feel like I could be using my time so much more wisely. But then I realize my day's already planned for me, right? Like, I mean, aside from the the plann periods, which are already chock full of stuff to do, like why would I buy one of those books if my day's already scheduled for me?

SPEAKER_00 3:35

So I thought we could start with the word purpose, which is uh such a big part of what you do at Nova Lab. Um, but maybe start with you. You're in your 31st year of teaching. How did you come to teaching and how did you find your purpose in education?

SPEAKER_01 3:53

I was in college, I was an English major, um, which I was sort of led to by my college roommate. His name is Brian. I went to high school with him, I was at Temple University, and I was in their honors program, but I didn't know exactly what I wanted to do. You know, it's a liberal arts uh school, so I had lots of options. Um and I kicked around a lot of ideas, and I sat down with Brian one time outside the library, and he said, Well, you know, you're good, you're good at English. Why don't you go into English? So I did that, and I came out and um tooled around in Germany for about a month or so to visit some relatives, came back and I got a job as a proofreader and copy editor at a medical publisher in Philadelphia. That wasn't what I wanted to do, uh, but it was um a place to land and use the skills that I had for a little while. I decided to go back to graduate school at Temple, and I was a teaching assistant. So they were paying for my grad school and giving me a stipend. And I realized quickly that I liked the teaching more than I liked the Ivory Tower scholarship of what was then, you know, a postmodern dominated um academic world. Within a year, uh, I called my high school because I had gotten into a summer teaching program at Temple. It was called an intern teaching for college graduates program. And if I finished this summer work, I could get a certificate through the state of Pennsylvania that would allow me to teach. I was in the program, I called my high school because I needed my immunization records, and my mom didn't have them. And my high school said, Well, we don't keep them, we throw them out after a few years. But I was talking to the woman who I knew very well, she was our high school secretary, and she said, Well, why do you need them? And I said, Well, I'm I'm looking for a job as a teacher. She told me to call this particular teacher, Dr. Donahue, who had been my advanced bioteacher. And I was in his office the next day, and within a couple of hours, uh, I had a job. It was there was nothing like most people go through, which is you sit and there's a panel of people and they ask you lots of questions, then you have to do a sample lesson, and then they you know there's a whole bunch of people. They were desperate, they knew me, and I walked in at the right time. And uh the the one question that I think really answers the question you asked me is Dr. Donahue asked me, well, why do you want to be a teacher? And my response was because I love learning. And that's as true now as it was then. I I love learning anything and everything, it doesn't have to be just English. And so when you asked me about my how I found my purpose, I think for me, the purpose was learning as an act that gives meaning to who I am and how I see myself and um how I want to fully actualize myself.

SPEAKER_00 7:16

When we have our back to school nights here, I have my slide about what are we going to be studying this year. And it's I always phrase it that way. What are we learning this year? And that's a point that I make to my parents. It's not just the students who are learning. I learn things every year, and it's great for the kids to see me learning. They understand that this it's not school ends and you you end learning. What's the single biggest change you've seen in education in your career?

SPEAKER_01 7:43

The digital revolution is I would say that's the single greatest change. It's a macro view. I know uh, you know, it's it's it encompasses almost everything, right? Because, you know, human beings, we have this, we're we're interesting creatures. We exist on top of a natural world, which we had no hand in creating. Um, we construct on top of that a built environment to shelter ourselves and to um orchestrate space and how we move through that space and what's possible within that space. And then we create virtual realms um to further extend our own exploration of I guess what it means to be human and what are the possibilities for us um beyond us, so to speak. So I I find that that that digital revolution is really the single greatest change.

SPEAKER_00 8:47

Yeah, I can still vaguely remember the pre-internet world. It's getting a little fuzzy now. I mean, there was the there really was no internet the way we know it when I even when I was in college. So and I'm I'm pretty thankful for that, honestly. Speaking about, you know, this the natural world, the humans had no hand in shaping and and human systems that we create over that natural world and education being one of them. And we can change human systems. That's one of the things that makes them human systems. And and um, I want to kind of segue now into Nova Lab, a way of thinking about the purpose of education. Um, you write in the sort of overview of the program that Nova Lab is an attempt to answer the question: what would a class look like if it was focused on helping students develop purpose, a healthy sense of self, and a vision for their lives? If learning were driven by the search for meaning rather than mandate, how did you conceptualize ID8 Nova Lab? How did it come together initially as a concept?

SPEAKER_01 9:49

My classroom is driven and always has been, so far as I can remember, since like the early 2000s. I received in the mail uh utterly, I don't know how I got on the mailing list, but I got something from a company called Sopy Paper, and they produce high-end paper for magazines and things like that. But they do a yearly um competition called Ideas That Matter, or at least they used to. And back in the early 2000s, somehow I got on their mailing list, and I uh these two posters arrived in my classroom, and they were two designers, and it was talking about design and how designers really ask two questions about the world. And I paraphrased the question so that they work best in my classroom, but essentially they are why are things the way they are? How can we make them better? So the first question is the traditional question of uh of education. You know, we want our students to be self-driven inquirers, curious about the world, and possessed of tools or a tool set that allows them to explore um their own curiosities and find not the answer, but answers to those um curiosities. And then the second question, how can we make them better, takes that and says, you know, there's one thing about education that we've really done a disservice to our students in, and that is recognizing that they are um they possess agency. All human beings possess agency. It's not something we give them, but it is something we can take away from them or limit them or you know, curtail. And so when I when we in my class, when I have this question, how can we make them better? I want my students to be exploring, okay, I found out why something is the way it is, but you know, does it always have to be that way? And if and and once we got into that realm, and this is when I was teaching um a self-created middle school course called uh connections or creative expressions, um once once they got to that point, they realized that there was a whole lot they could do. And so I was moved to the high school in 2014 to start a gifted um English program here. And I was sort of beside myself because I had not been an English teacher for 20 years. Like I when I even though I had my English degree and I was, you know, my BA is in English and I had my teaching certificate, the certificate is actually in curriculum instruction and technology or something like that. So for most of my middle school years, most of 20 years, I was teaching a self-created humanities class that allowed me to explore a whole lot of areas with students. And then when I was asked to become an English teacher again at the high school level, I was like, okay, who is this person that used to be an English teacher? What did he do? And so I came back to the high school and I started looking at what other English teachers were doing, and I was given a lot of leeway because the the curriculum for the gifted program had not yet been created. And so I asked my superintendent, I said, Well, what's your vision for this class? And the first word out of her mouth, and the only word I remember, was different. And so I said to myself, Well, I've been doing different for 20 years. I can do different here at the high school. And what that meant was that yes, I would still dive into the texts that the students were reading in the other English classes, but I was going to approach them differently, and we were going to do things differently. And so that itch to be different led me to discover it's alternately called genius hour 20-time projects, purpose projects. So I discovered purpose projects, and I started having my students do these projects where they came up with what it was they wanted to study, so long as the thing that they studied and that they wanted to work through had a tangible product at the end and met two other criteria, which was that it was meaningful to them, but consequential to a larger community, right? So this comes from Bill Damon's work out at Stanford in Youth Purpose. Um, his definition for purpose, and again, I'm I'm paraphrasing, is something to the extent of um, you know, is an a uh um intentional um act on the learner's part to engage in something that is meaningful to them but consequential for a larger community. And that comes out of his his work with meaning and with understanding what is meaningful and why meaning is more important than being happy and those kind of things. So those projects, when I tried to pack them into an English curriculum, um, there wasn't enough room. Students were like really diving in and exploring things and trying to do, you know, 20% of your time per week. So, okay, every Friday we're doing projects. Or um if we try to spread it out twice a week, then you're impacting the regular curriculum. So I had to find a way to make it fit. And what I what I did was I started looking around and I discovered the work of Don Wettrick. If you don't know Don Wettrick, you should take a look at the work that he's done, not only in schools, he no longer teaches, but at Noblesville High School in Indiana. Um, and then he wrote a book called Pure Genius, which was uh subtitled Taking 20 Time to the Next Level. And um so I read that and I Skyped with Don a couple times and I got an idea, I got some ideas, and I pitched a new class to my superintendent and to the other um administrators here at the high school. And I was rather cavalier about it. I remember one of the lines in the pitch was something like if all we're gonna do here is constantly roll out the same old curriculums, we might as well just spend our time, you know, reading the labels inside of our underwear because we're not we're not really changing anything. Um and they said, okay. So I prototyped the class in 2016. It was all based on purpose projects and design thinking and um giving them a um like a methodology for their explorations that encompassed empathy um for human beings and iterative cycles to sort of like come up with um products or projects or exhibits or whatever it was that they wanted to explore. Um and so that that rolled out in 2016 as a semester-long class.

SPEAKER_00 17:10

You had some structural um things on your side. You had a pretty flexible administration. I I mean, I think even back to your point of um why are things the way they are, I feel like that's still a fairly new, fairly progressive idea in education. I think in a lot of I think education traditionally is this is the way things are. And even having students question why are things the way they are, I feel like is a huge step in a school, is a is a mindset that a lot of schools I don't know that are even at necessarily. I don't know if you agree with that assertion.

SPEAKER_01 17:51

I would have said 10 years ago, no, I don't agree with that assertion. Um, I do agree with that assertion now. And I think one of the reasons is I've been reading, um, and this is just within the past week, um, I've been reading and looking at these short videos that this gentleman, Thomas Arnett, and I forget where he's from, um, but he's uh he's talking about school change and what is possible. And he's one of the few people who basically says that if you're trying to change a public school, it's not actually going to work. Um the entire system, you know, changing the entire system, there's too much um inertia in the opposite direction, right? And in there's too much inertia that's pulled back, I guess, by the gravity of the past. And that past is, well, everybody in that school system went through schools. Their concept of what school is is based on their own experiences. And how do you change the story of school when everybody has basically the same story? And so um he talks about, you know, you have to really change value networks and things like that. And it's almost impossible to do that in public schools because public schooling is a wicked problem, right? And and wicked problems are multifaceted, and any attempt to like alter the system um in on one facet is always going to have repercussions on other facets. And so um, you can never really utterly disrupt and innovate a public school system. You can only ever make it somewhat better, I guess. Right. So um I what I'm what I'm saying is that yeah, um I've been banging my head against the wall for years. Um and most of the innovation I've done is within my own class. I I feel somewhat defeatist in saying that. But the the most interesting and progressive work is being done by people who are either in independent schools or who are starting new schools. And when you start from the ground up, um you're setting value systems and you're and you're getting people to join that school who are saying, we like what's different about this.

SPEAKER_02 20:21

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 20:21

But I you know you're describing the just the struggle of changing a system, moving a system along. But I do love, I mean, I think Nova Lab. Lab is the perfect word here. You know, you you have your classroom's a laboratory and you're spreading the word. You're here with me, you are you're you know, going to conferences. And so you're taking your experiences and you're you're bringing them out into the public view. And to your point that maybe changing a school, changing a system feels like Sisyphus. But I think through work like yours, uh education can uh can can pick up some some much needed markers on how we can, you know, even if it's changing the Titanic by one one or two degrees to the port side. Or so what how do you account for your superintendent, your administration being so flexible and open to you cavalierly saying, Yeah, enough of this BS. Let's try something totally new.

SPEAKER_01 21:19

I think it has it goes back to like my fourth year of teaching. So um that's when I was asked to take on this new program at the middle school. Uh, we had and there was a time when we actually did um jigger the direction of this dreadnought and in in more than one or two degrees. Uh in 1994, my district did something called a future search. And there's a a network called the Future Search Network. You can look them up online. Um, they're out of actually somewhere near me here in Philadelphia. And um They led us through what I now know is a huge design charrette. And the charrette brought in stakeholders from administrators, teachers, students, parents in the district, people who had students go through the district and still lived here, and people who never had children, but are still obviously stakeholders within a public school system. And we brought almost 150 of these people together at a large meeting house. It was an old farm, an old barn building that one of the local um pharmaceutical companies had rehabbed. And we got together with the goal of answering this question. So this is 1994. And the question was what do we want the graduate of 2010 to look like? So 16 years in the future, we're projecting this is a thing we called it, you know, like I said, a future search. And um, that's how I got involved in this middle school program called Creative Expressionslash Connections. Because out of that design charret, one of the things that the public and teachers wanted was more of a focus on the arts and the connections between the arts in the middle grades. And so we created this class, and for the better part of 20 years, um, I was able to innovate within that. It was a living curriculum, it wasn't tied to any other curricula. In the beginning, we tried to run it so that students not only had um creative expressions, but they had art and music at the same time. Because my end of it was supposed to be like a language artsy type end. And whatever I was doing would be reflected in what the art teacher and the music teacher were doing. So if I were studying, if they were studying rhythm and I was studying rhythm, I'm looking at rhythm in poetry and in human language. They're looking at rhythm and different types of rhythm in music, and they're looking at how do artists, visual artists, portray rhythm. Um, that lasted for one year because what we realized is you don't run a school schedule based upon the special classes, right? Um, so it just the the nature of public schooling put the kibosh on that real early. So I had to subsume within my own curriculum, I I had to learn more about art, I had to learn more about music, and I had to find those connections for myself, which given that I love learning, that was that was a wonderful experience for me. And um coming out of that, I I realized that what my district had done was they had given me um a lot of power to guide that curriculum. And if you know Spider-Man, right, you know, with great power comes great responsibility. So, okay, I I took on the responsibility to make sure that whatever I did was pedagogically sound or at least progressively pedagogically sound.

SPEAKER_00 25:11

Is that, do you think, one of the fundamental differences between the the dreadnought of public schools, of most public schools, and some of these more like experimental, independent or lab schools, teacher autonomy? 100%.

SPEAKER_01 25:26

Yeah. When I used to go around speaking about this class, um, and I would go to because I got really heavy into design and design thinking towards the end of my time in this class. And I would travel around speaking at design camps and design conferences. And I I would speak to people and they'd be like, Is that is that an in are you in an independent school? And I was like, No, this is a public school. They're like, How did you do that? And you know, so I I go back to the the design charret and the future search. But I think what you're pointing to is that like that's a the class has a very agile feel to it, right? Because the curriculum is was always changing based on what's at the art museum. So we would always go to the art museum every every year and and twice a year because the class was like a semester-long class. So whatever the art exhibit was drove what the curriculum would focus on. And yeah, so it had to be agile, it had to be nimble, and I guess also it had to have someone at the helm who was comfortable in that position, right? And um, I don't think it's me patting myself on the back too much to say there's not a lot of people who are comfortable in those situations.

SPEAKER_00 26:41

It the the amount of risk taking is very high. I remember a long time ago, a professor saying to me, or saying to a class, I was in an education class, and he said, like, the only thing you really need to know about the history of education in America is that John Dewey lost. You know, we we didn't go that way. But but what you're doing and what other, you know, in small batches in some schools is I think in some ways bringing that spirit back. Um, you know, Dewey's winning in some places, the exploration, the inquiry, you know, system-wide, not at all. But I I do want to get to now the Nova Lab. What does it look like? What's a a day at Nova Lab? I I was looking at some student projects, and there was one. I I just want to start with this this this one student, this young lady, Rebecca, um, in her introduction video to her photography project, she's talking about how she just kind of stumbled into your program and and even on the first day was like, What did I get myself into? But then, but then she ends it, she ends the video by saying, This is what I'd been looking for my entire high school life. I had always felt like a number. What is going on in your in your in your classroom that a student would say that something that profound? What is when students come into Novalab, what do they experience? What's a day like? What's a week like? What are these projects like?

SPEAKER_01 28:06

So the projects don't actually start until about December. Um, the first three and a half months. Um, I run a project called Project Wayfinder. Um, I highly recommend it to anyone who is looking. It's more recently, they've they've pivoted to brand themselves as an SEL, you know, socioemotional learning, but they have lots of different texts. And the one I use is called Purposeful Leadership. And it's all about how do you how do you discover what is meaningful for you, a purpose for yourself, and then how do you build out a project that you are leading based upon that purpose? So this is uh it was created by this young guy named Patrick Cook Deegan, and he was a um, the D school has a K-12 lab um out at Stanford, and he was a fellow for two years there. They basically funded him for two years to develop this project. It's well established now. They have venture capital funding, and it and and Patrick's just like he's just awesome. He's got such an awesome team around him of really young people who really want to help students understand why purpose and meaning in life is so important. And so I run that um in the beginning of the year to get them acclimated to, first of all, building a community that understands we're going to be doing different things here. And that means we need to honor each other, to bring energy and heart to our classroom every day and to be comfortable with doing things differently. So when Rebecca says, What did I get myself into? That's part of it, right? That's part of it is that you come in here and we're doing improv activities and we're, you know, taking vegetables on journeys around the world and all these other strange things. And then we're going a little bit deeper into yourself and looking at your own personal histories and looking at what's your contribution to your larger community. And so um it we go there. We also do a uh a lot with design thinking so that they have this, you know, design thinking. I always call it a heuristic, right? It is a methodology or a series of mindsets that you can use to organize your own self-learning. And um, I I asked them to go through that to develop their own projects. Um and Rebecca was exactly as she said, she felt like a number. She did the things that you were supposed to do in school. She did them well because she was told to do them, and she was a very good follower, right? She's your like she was like me. Like uh I wanted to succeed at school because the rewards I felt from learning things and getting the A on the test were they were utterly external, um, but they felt good, right? Because all external rewards feel good. And the problem is you get hooked on them. Um, and once you get hooked on them, there's one of two things that can happen. One, they lose their power over you, or two, you become so dependent on them that all you ever are for the rest of your life is somebody who's a really good worker for somebody else, right? You're utterly compliant and you do what you're told. Um, and I think what she said, you know, what she's saying there is she came in and she'd always wanted to explore photography, but she never had the time. She never had the time to fit it into her schedule. And this was a space where she could do that. She was able to explore and and really find something that she wanted to be interested in. Um, and that was photography for her.

SPEAKER_00 32:07

Hey listeners, I hope you enjoy the show. And if you do, consider joining me in this endeavor by supporting me on Patreon. Monthly membership is super inexpensive, but it's a cool way for you to show me that you like what I'm up to here at the microphone. There's a link in the show notes. Join now for just a couple bucks a month, and I'll send you a very cool what's the big idea sticker. You mentioned design thinking, which is uh a really I found a powerful way to get students thinking about their communities, about their world, about their contributions. I love the empathy piece. Maybe talk a bit about the design process with your students and I maybe with a focus on the empathy, why empathy is an important starting point in a design project.

SPEAKER_01 33:00

The the great thing about design thinking is that if when you look at, or at least when I used to look at those, here's the list of the 10 most important skills that um you know the World Economic Forum or whomever is you know looking at it, OECD, whoever, um you'll always find problem solving is within the top 10. But um when I read Dan Pink's book, um, A Whole New Mind, Why Right Brain People You know, Will Will Rule the World, or whatever, I forget exactly what the subtitle is. Um, he has a section on design. And uh he writes that in the mid-2000s, when you looked at these lists, um they asked superintendents of schools to list their top 10. And problem solving is in there, and critical thinking is in there. Um, and then they asked um business, like like the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, to list what they think are the most important skills for workers. And yes, problem solving was in the top 10, but it was much lower down than what superintendents had put it. And actually, the first one was problem finding, right? Because any worker who can find problems adds value to the system. Problem solving, especially now with AI, you know, that's a dime a dozen, okay? Not that not that human ingenuity isn't going to always be required for that, but problem finding, right? That brings mark, that opens markets for people. Um, but what it also does is it is this attempt to try and make the world a better place, right? So I don't look at it from the more cynical point where no, it's actually just a profit motive, right? I mean, I think what problem finding can do if we separate it from, you know, like the more capitalist notions, is that at the community level, problem finding is about how do we make our own spaces um better for those in our community. And so because problem finding is so important, and it is usually human beings who exhibit and suffer from those problems, design thinking starts with empathy, right? You you you notice something in the world and you start asking people about it, and you start doing interviews and you start hearing and listening at really deep levels. And once you start hearing these stories, you start identifying patterns. And those patterns lead you to create a um like a how might we statement or a point of view statement that says, okay, this these particular people have this problem. So how might we insert verb here, you know, something so that these people are, you know, are are able to express themselves more freely in um town hall meetings or something like that, right? Like, so um what I love about design thinking is that it's so the the other name that people often refer to it by is human-centered design. Um so I'm I base a lot of the work in Nova Lab on trying to find problems that are human-centered and how can we work to help other people um and and design with them to make the world a better place. I've since tried to expand beyond that, though, because I realize that the anthropocentric view um often still leads to negative impacts on um the larger biosphere. And looking more now at things like regenerative design and how human-centered design um can coexist with regenerative design so that we're not extracting and um you know so much from the biosystems and and the biosphere itself, but we're trying to help it heal as well.

SPEAKER_00 37:13

It's hard to sort of uh decouple our capitalist consumerist way of thinking from something like a design thinking cycle. I do love the the user um element. And and even doing design thinking helped me realize how just even in my own classroom as a history teacher, I need to I needed to put students more in touch with people outside of the room, right? That just interviewing somebody that works in an air in a field, how much that how much understanding and empathy students gain that I could just never give them in the classroom. It's really powerful. When we were communicating before this, you you um messaged me something like you'd like to bring in more tech type of projects and less social entrepreneurship. I was at a school where we had actually the opposite problem. Everything seemed to be like a tech project, and we were like, okay, this is great now, but how can we bring this more into the human social side? What have been some of your favorite projects? Or maybe highlight a project or two, and then maybe what's something that you'd like to see?

SPEAKER_01 38:17

What I'm looking for, I think, is more balance, right? Like I want this class to sort of evolve into sort of like a futures thinking academy where we're looking at um better possible futures and how do we achieve those with, you know, you can't, I don't think there's any way that we could ever achieve them without technology, without, you know, devolving the human race. I just don't, that's not going to happen. So um, when I say I'd like more technology, it's because it allows us to prototype faster and to see things and give them, you know, like a uh corporeal form. Um but the social entrepreneurship aspect is still utterly important. And so some of my favorite projects. Well, last year, and you know, it sounds like kind of like, oh, that was not such a big idea, but there was a fundraiser last year that two uh young gentlemen ran. Um, and it was called Spike Valley, and it was a spike ball. If you know the game Spike Ball, it's like this little trampoline and a ball, and I'd never seen it before. But um, it wasn't so much the fact that they ran a fundraiser that I thought was great, it was the way they did it, like having the time in my classroom to organize that and then to turn around and on a cold, somewhat overcast May or no, uh early June day, get close to 60 high school students out into our stadium, populate the football field with all these little spike ball um uh you know games going on, and then they they turn around, they raise like close to $2,000 for um a local um uh special needs um charity was was amazing because there was no day when they were here that they weren't working. And the boys actually were in two different classes. Matt, who was one of them, was in my 10th period class, and Michael was in my third period class. So they had to communicate across you know time and they had to meet each other after class, but they were so driven to do this um and to make this thing work that, and this gets to another aspect of the class that you might find interesting is that um um it had nothing to do with grades because the the class is largely gradeless. Um, I take narratives from the students, I ask them to put together digital portfolios, and then you know, whatever they can show me or whatever, I do have to deliver a grade at the end, but the class is largely passfail. Um, so they uh Matt went on to Lehigh University in education, and he turned around, and one of his um freshman projects was to create a podcast on gradelessness. And he he and Michael did an episode together where they talked about how if the class had been graded, they would not have done nearly as much for that project because they would have stopped at whatever it took to get the A, because that's what they've been trained to do. So that was an awesome project because it actually has legs and it's still going on. They created a booklet and they handed it down to students this year, and that project's gonna happen again this year. Not in my class, they have another senior who's running it, and they're gonna continue to help fund that charity. Um, another project that was awesome was in our very first year, 2019-2020. There's a project called Make It 100. And a young girl who I had taught in my gifted English classes realized that we had a really important election coming up in 2020. And she wanted to get every senior in our high school who was eligible to vote in the 2020 election registered to vote. Because there were a lot of there are a lot of people who at you know at the age uh uh that they can vote are not registered because they don't realize it or they just don't do it. So it was a civics program, and she had a team of like five other people. They ran registration drives, totally nonpartisan. All they're looking to do is to make it 100% of eligible voters are registered to vote. And um they ran drives, they visited with local um representatives and state senators, and we presented at a conference in Philadelphia called EduCon, which is hosted by the Philadelphia Science Leadership Academy and a gentleman named Chris Lehman. And um the publication Editopia was there, if you know George Lucas's foundation. And they sat in on our presentation and they were like, we want to bring a film crew to your school and film one of these drives and have you talk about this project, the class that it came out of. And so uh the young lady who was running this project, her name is Taya, um, we were all ready to go. We they were going to be coming in late March, and then COVID hit and shut everything down. And so, like nothing ever happened beyond that. Uh, it was a really hard time. But with you know, just within three months being able to put together a project like that, when you realize How much they're also doing in other classes. And this is an egg, this is, you know, it's an elective class. So there's no homework for the class. But what I do tell students is that if they are really invested in their projects, they will pursue them outside of school. Um, and the other thing I tell them, and this was um seconded by a parent who helps me out when we do our presentations, is that one of the other reasons I created this class is because I was teaching students, gifted students, who were all they were all taking all the APs they could. They were all getting A's, and they're all gonna apply to really good schools, most of them. But their their uh their college transcript and their packet, their application packet is gonna get put into a pile with a whole lot of other high achievers, right? And if all you have, if the only narrative is here's my grade report, that narrative is um is empty and I think really bankrupt of any larger story of what this student is capable of. So what I wanted to do was create a class where it wasn't about, you know, what what grade you got. It was about what you can do with the knowledge and skill set that you have that shows people, I'm not only thinking about myself, I'm thinking about other people. And this parent came to me earlier in the year and he said, I was just out walking my dog with a woman, and they had a college coach come in to work with their daughter to put together her application. And this college coach said, What colleges are really looking for are students who can head up a project that is like that has a community-wide impact. And I was, and he's like, and I thought of your class because that's exactly what you're doing. And I was like, Yeah, I'm I'm you know, I'm not the only one, but I'm definitely ahead of the curve on a lot of things.

SPEAKER_00 46:06

So just uh as we kind of wind down here, just getting to your second big question, how can we make things better? How can we what's the lesson for education from Nova Lab? From your your experimenting with these students, these projects outside of the normal venues uh paths of education. What's what what can we take away for broader education?

SPEAKER_01 46:28

So I think you're right. Uh early in our conversation, you mentioned the word risk. Um, risk has always been part of the equation for me, because once I realized that all I had done in school through high school and through college was simply work to get the A. When I was good at that, right? Like I said, I got lots of trivia in my head. But it didn't allow me to explore outside of the system itself. And once I was put in a position that allowed me to do that, I thought back on a book that I had picked up in college called A Whack on the Side of the Head, How You Can Be a More Creative Thinker, by this guy, Roger Von Eck. And it changed my life because I realized at that point when I had that book, I'm like, oh, I don't have to follow the traditional pathways. I can like do crazy things and I can think up new ways to do things. So the lesson is you need to make space where risk is possible and where the fear of failure is not a fear, right? Like, and I know it sounds trite now because every teacher has in their classroom a poster that says fail, first attempt in learning, right? Okay, so cliche now. But you you can say that all you want. As long as you have grades and as long as you are holding people to these really, really high standards, you're never going to break out of the system that is simply trying to replicate itself. So I would say, you know, you have to make space for risk. You have to give people the opportunity to take risks with the understanding that it is a responsibility on their part to learn from what worked and what didn't, and then to try and make that better. If we can say that this is an that learning is an iterative cycle, that is never like education is never an end state. I can never say I'm an educated person because there's always more to learn, right? Um, I always like to say that we are always human beings in the becoming. And that means I'm always trying to find a better version of myself. Um, lots of teachers talk about this. There's the um the headmaster of the green school in Bali is named Benjamin Freud. If you've not, if you have you interviewed Benjamin, he because he's awesome.

SPEAKER_00 48:54

I I have it, but he's on my list.

SPEAKER_01 48:56

Yeah, you got it. Like he and I go back and forth on like human beings in the becoming. Um, and then Monty Syrie, I know you've interviewed Monty. He's an awesome guy. Uh, he's he's always in pursuit of better. So I'll I'll just echo those two people and say, let's let's recognize that education is not an end state, it is an iterative process, and it's always about us trying to become better people, not only for ourselves, but for others as well.

SPEAKER_00 49:28

After Gareth and I wrapped up the interview, we talked for a few minutes about how I need to get him back on the show so that we can get into the particulars of Nova Lab and uh how he pulls it off day in and day out. But this conversation was just so fun and philosophical and big idea-ish. I was already planning my trip out to Pennsylvania so we can uh sit over a beer and continue. Garrett's points about education and the effort he's putting into tinkering and trying new things is such a valuable lesson for anyone in education who wants to change the status quo and has been thinking about how it can be done. And I think Garrett's larger point that systems-wide, it's really not going to happen anytime soon. It's going to take efforts like Gareth's and in other uh lab schools, independent schools, where teachers can try new things and get it out there in the world for other educators to learn from. I'd love to hear your thoughts on anything shared in this uh interview today. Uh I'm on Instagram and X Um Threads at Big IdeaEd. Uh, shoot me a note, question, comment. Uh, I hope you enjoy today's show and uh tune in next time.